


what's a crowd to a queen?

by kwritten



Series: Femlash February 2016 [12]
Category: British Royalty RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 07:03:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6108832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for the prompt: meeting face-to-face for the first time</p>
            </blockquote>





	what's a crowd to a queen?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [becky_dull](https://archiveofourown.org/users/becky_dull/gifts).



There is something fundamentally _lonely_ and tragic about being a Queen; something inexplicably exhausting about being the only one of your kind in every room you enter, never being part of the crowd.

There are girls, hundreds and dozens of girls, that fill up the Court and simper around her, longing for her crown and her throne and her Power and not understanding any of it, crowds of them working together and fighting each other and never ever knowing how much better it is to be part of a herd. To know that when you turn around, there is someone _there_ , right there at your elbow, that knows something fundamental about you. A mirror of your desires and needs and limitations wandering around outside of yourself; proving … something indefinable, intangible, something that for a Queen was always out of reach. 

Elizabeth looked across the room at her cousin and narrowed her eyes.

After all of this time, after all of these years of spies and wars and threats and second-hand information, here they were, face-to-face and it wasn’t at all what she wanted it to be.

The woman standing in front of her was _familiar_ somehow, as though they had been raised together since they were babes in arms, as though they had always been this far apart – close enough to reach out, to touch, to feel, to _know_ , close enough to see every freckle, every line, every gray hair, every scar.

A mirror.

“So the rumors are true,” she scoffed, as if she was about to throw out an insult. She wanted to, but what came out next was anything but, said softer than she’d spoken in years, something longing in her throat that she’d never allowed herself to feel before, “You really are as beautiful as they say.”

Mary raised her chin slightly, but didn’t blush.

 _How elegant_ , how delightful, how commonplace to be told by a rival that you are lovely, that you are fine, that you are worth paintings and songs and poetry, how _elegant_ to hold your own beauty in such little regard for it is a presumed weapon, that she didn’t even need to blush.

Jealousy was too formal a word, too small, it did not hold everything in it that Elizabeth suddenly needed to express.

She raised her hand slightly, but did not reach forward, did not dare to press her fingers against that fair cheek, “It evokes a certain sense of longing, doesn’t it?”

“And what is that, my queen?” there was no deference in Mary’s voice, no humility, she managed to say the word _queen_ as if she herself had invented it in order to designate something so far beneath her as to no longer be of consequence.

“Your face,” Elizabeth said shortly, dropping her hand, thinking not of her wig and her powders and her own wrinkles and shortcomings, but rather of a sudden driving need to _possess_. She began pacing the length of the room “I have read poetry about men becoming so entranced with a woman’s face or smile or ankles that they lose all rational thought, hounded and haunted by this visage that they must have…”

Mary looked towards a window, bored.

Elizabeth wondered if she talked too long if Mary would dare to sit in her presence. She wondered what her reaction ought to be if she did. She wondered at what it must feel like to be in a room with someone that sat when they wanted to sit and stood when they wanted to stand and laughed when they wanted to laugh. What would she do in a room with another person and felt as though she could move around freely?

“I imagine a face like yours could inspire that level of madness,” she finished lamely.

 _I imagine a face like yours could inspire that level of madness **in me**_.

Mary smiled serenely, but did not respond.

One of her courtiers would have taken this opportunity to turn the compliment back around on her, flatter their queen with wit and proclamations of her own beauty. That Mary didn’t was a treat, a rare feeling of honesty, a slap across a face that had never been touched in such a way.

The stillness in the air hung heavy and uncomfortable, nothing suggested that she had the upper hand and she felt herself having no desire at all to reach for it or find her footing again. She felt weightless.

Elizabeth cleared her throat awkwardly.

Mary sat down unbidden, “I have never encouraged that level of madness.”

She behaved as though Elizabeth had encouraged her to sit, as though there had never been an awkward silence between them, as though they were two old friends having a chat over tea.

“No,” Elizabeth smiled. As if everything Mary’s rude behavior suggested was true and at her bidding. “I don’t suppose you would.” She sat down next to her cousin, too close, too close, too close, and took her hand, “I’m so glad you have come home at last.”

As if they weren’t sitting in a prison, as if Mary’s head was on a chopping block, as if they hadn’t been avoiding this moment their whole lives.

Mary covered Elizabeth’s hands with the one left unoccupied, “I never thought I would consider England my home.”

My kingdom, my county, my birthright, but not a home.

And wasn’t that the fundamental difference between the two of them.

Elizabeth leaned forward and kissed Mary gently on the lips, “I think I shall keep you.”

Mary did not respond. There was nothing left to say. They were as trapped as they had ever been, hidden in unspoken words, trapped by conventions.

Two queens in a room is not a crowd, it is the loneliest place of all.

Elizabeth fell asleep to the memory of Mary’s lips on hers and she pretended (not for the first time) that it was anything other than what it was. Happiness, lust, love, equality, a mirror to press against her lips to see her breath and prove that she was still alive.

Floating and weightless, but never free.


End file.
